> Telemedicine? No: on May 11, the feds declared an end of the “public health emergency” that allowed telemedicine across state lines.
The people holding back telehealth should be uhhhhh asked to reconsider.
The people holding back telehealth should be uhhhhh asked to reconsider.
Sure, if something looks fishy you could then go through the appropriate legal channels to get a more exact location from the ISP, but false positives are going to happen so often, eventually everyone involved might get a bit cranky.
* Only the likes of Google have the scale and requisite information to keep more accurate and up-to-date databases, and even those are fallible.
You can't trust even that. There's an ISP which shares the IP pool between its child companies (? or some similar arrangement) in Crimea and Poland. We found out when Polish subscribers got affected by sanctions on business with Crimea.
Don't trust it for anything important ever.
The telemedicine visits themselves are conducted through MyChart. It's definitely not checking my IP or it would've caught me a long time ago, especially since I have to check the "I am currently in <x state>" checkbox every single time I see him :P
IE if I am a New Yorker being treated via telemedicine by someone in Alaska or Nigeria, should New York be concerned that I can be treated by someone it would not consider a “real doctor,” and may not even be a doctor in the jurisdiction they are in?
You can argue that the market would sort itself out eventually because those who didn’t know how to find useful teledocs would die out, but it’s up you you whether you are comfortable with that.
You’re using an edge case of a doctor in another continent to illustrate why we shouldn’t allow telemedicine appointment in the same country’s medical system across regions. That argument is classic false equivalence.
Imagine if we were restrictive in the first place... The luddites could teach us a thing or two.
No, it makes certification by State governments very difficult. The solution to that "problem" is obvious: stop the monopoly that State governments have on certifications. Let patients decide based on whatever information they deem relevant whether a doctor is "certified" to treat them. There are already many private sources of information about doctors.
Speak for yourself. I am at least as good as State governments at judging the competence of doctors to treat me. I suspect a lot of people are like me. I particularly suspect that a lot of people who have considerable experience dealing with doctors who were "certified" by State medical boards are like me. The question is not just how good or bad individuals are at it, but whether States are even worse.
But even if many are like you, I am not saying States cannot publish information about which doctors they think are certified. I am just saying that patients and doctors should not be restricted by that. Patients who want to rely on their State to do it can of course do that. But patients who want to make use of other information should be allowed to, and doctors should be allowed to treat them if the patients choose, without facing legal penalties.
Evidence, please?
What goes horrifically wrong if there are multiple certifying authorities for medical practitioners, with varying criteria, and various meta-organizations making recommendations about which certifying authorities are better than others, and people make informed decisions accordingly? Some people will absolutely make ill-informed decisions, and those should still be their decisions to make. That seems preferable to the world in which someone can't see the specialist they want to see because they're in another jurisdiction.
But for normal doc in the box telemedicine, it’s a recipe for disaster, as shitty doctors will shift or pretend to shift between state lines to avoid license disciplinary actions.
There’s so many NPs and PAs in practice now, the state requirements are unlikely to be a big burden for most cases.
There’s no need to risk death to drive to the doctor. There’s also no reason to risk death by getting ripped off or getting substandard care from a doctor of questionable ethics and ability. It’s pretty simple - you see an online provider in your state or a state with reciprocity.
I used to be familiar with medical frauds. Doctors who “see” 600 patients a day, etc. Online medicine is pretty bullshitty to begin with, but kneecapping the primary controls that we have to address fraud and abuse is not progress. Anything that undermines trust in the name of supposed convenience is a net negative.